Bold Ideas with Mike Maksymiw

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You'll save hours every month by eliminating manual exports and fixing broken spreadsheets. And you'll finish client work in record time by utilizing Liveflow's over 100 customizable templates. It's a true set-it-and-forget-it solution that allows you to spend your time offering insightful client advisory. To revolutionize your financial reporting in Excel with Liveflow, and to get 25% off your first three months, click the link in the podcast show notes. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. Today I'm joined by Mike Maxmu, the Executive Director of the Abreo Firm Alliance. Welcome to the pod, Mike. Thanks Dominic, happy to be here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you're in a little bit of a different situation than a lot of the guests I've had. I've spoken with a lot of kind of like firm owners and people kind of in senior positions at firms, but you're actually seated within kind of the Alliance part of Abreo rather than the core firm itself. Are you able to kind of talk us through that whole situation kind of and how Abreo Firm Alliance works? Sure. So Abreo itself is a top 25 accounting firm. We do all the regular stuff accounting firms do. We do a whole lot of other weird things that are ancillary to accounting. And that's really fueled the growth of Abreo the last few years. And one of those weird things we do is we run an Alliance. So other local firms pay us a membership fee to get access to resources that a top 25 firm has that a local firm typically doesn't have. This way that local firm can continue to serve the clients in its community because those community clients need the local accounting firm. They don't need a big behemoth accounting firm to do main street type accounting work. So we want to make sure those local firms can continue to exist because they're vital to our whole accounting ecosystem. Okay, I love that. And so there are like a bunch of other firm alliances like Moore Lineal, for example. And so what is it that sets Abreo apart? I guess it's somewhat unique among a few others that you actually also have like a core accounting firm at the center of all of this, right? Yeah. So there are a handful that have an accounting firm backed as part of the Alliance. And there are a bunch that are more networks, not the right word, but like they're groups of accounting firms, but there's no accounting firm sticking behind them. We have that. And the other part that sets us apart from the others is the kind of firm that we're going after as members. We want the local firm, that million and a half to nine, $10 million firm. They're doing really well. They're one of the best firms in their area. They really don't want to get acquired. They want to remain fiercely independent and it's getting harder and harder because there's so many more people knocking on their door because an $8 million firm that's making good money and has good clients and has great talent is a sweet acquisition target for nearly anyone, other public accounting firms, PE firms. So we want to help them stay in their local community. And it's a little bit smaller firm than some of the other firm backed alliances are going for or some of the other alliances you mentioned are going for as well. OK, interesting. So, I mean, the type of firm you described is honestly, in my experience, in the conversations I've had, seems to be like the really happy places in accounting. Right. The little oasis is where it's like this firm's doing super well. The owner's not necessarily only driven by like, how do I get to this like private equity backed acquisition? You know, things are going well, but it's not completely like to a scale where you just become a cog in a machine. So, I mean, that's super interesting for sure. And then how does it like benefit a little bit having the central firm and then having the alliance of firms around it rather than just having the alliance of firms? Because we actually had a conversation prior to this where, shameless plug, but I was kind of trying to sell you on Big Four Transparency as a compensation product for the Aprio firm alliance. And you were talking about how sometimes you actually just pilot things inside of Aprio first. Is that like a major selling feature for this alliance where you get to kind of just give your own best practices rather than just facilitate conversations around like what each member firm's best practices are? Yeah, my brain's going through about 97 different things, but I'll start with where you ended. Aprio has done a lot of M&A the last three, four years. It's grown tremendously. And what matters there for these firms is that the firms Aprio has acquired, most of them are similar size to the ones in our alliance. So Aprio itself isn't just 500 people that were sitting in Atlanta and they've only known this big firm mentality. More than half of our personnel grew up in the local firm in their community. They know what that's like. They were just doing it a few years ago. So when our alliance firms say, so how do you do this, Mike? I say, you know what? Our firm in Nashville that we merged in a handful of years ago, they went through the same process. Let me get Jeffrey on the phone because he knows the ins and outs of it. And I'll connect the alliance member with the current office managing partner who was likely the managing partner of the firm we acquired. And these firms get to talk at the same level with the same issues and the same resource constraints to solve them, which is really great for the members on a practice management side of running the business of accounting. And on the technical side, when their best client goes, hey, so yeah, we want to go expand into this foreign country. And the local firms like, dang, I've read about that. I've never done it. You're one of my best clients. And most accounting firms will sit there and do truckload of research because we're always self-sufficient. We're brilliant people. We know we can do it. What the alliance members get to do is, hey, Mike, who in your international team has ever walked somebody out through expanding into this foreign country? Hey, we have a whole practice team in that area. Let me connect you with the expert there and they'll help you out and your client. Nice. Yeah. So we get to do weird stuff and the firm gets to keep the whole client relationship. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was like one of the big benefits of like when I was at the big four too, right? And that's what some clients got sold on is like, well, you have a transfer pricing issue. No problem. Like you want to understand how like this factory in Bangladesh is going to be operated. Like we've got someone for that. Right. So I guess you get to kind of offer that full suite and probably take on much larger clients within a smaller firm than you could otherwise. So that's actually that's really interesting. Yeah. And it's so much fun because the work that Aprio is picking up is project based. You know, we're doing the that super weird thing. It might even be a consistent project, but it's normally the thing that makes a client think they have to jump from the local firm to the next biggest firm in the marketplace because that firm can handle this odd issue. Well, now this local firm can say, hey, we might not do it inside our four walls, but because of this relationship, we can handle it. And you get to keep the 20 year relationship you have with us. We can do 90% of all the work you have. We'll just use Aprio for this one weird thing. Mm hmm. Interesting. And then so it sounds like there's a bit of like a sliding scale of support, right, where like if if a firm kind of puts their hands up and says, like, I need help, they can either join as a member firm or they can just flat out end up getting acquired, depending, I guess, on like the ownership and partner team's appetite for, you know, what level of integration are they really looking for? Is there typically like a difference in situation between firms who, you know, like if you find yourself a little bit out of your depth, when is it time to just get acquired and when is it time to kind of join an alliance? I think if you you really want to stay serving your local clients and. And focus on your community versus, OK, I've been managing partner for 15 years, we don't really have the bench strength to go handle our current buyout agreement. That might be the time to go look at being acquired by someone. We would also recommend to that alliance firm, like, why don't we take a look at some of these agreements that are putting artificial roadblocks in front of your next generation? What if we could help you in the next three to five years make your firm look like it should be acquired by someone inside? Like, what are they telling you and me, Dominic? Like, we look like the next generation of partners. We've got 20 years left in the profession. We could do some damage on changing the firm and the culture and how we serve clients. Like we were ready, willing and able, but there's all these artificial roadblocks that got put in the way 20 years ago with partnership agreements, sometimes the general partner model of running a firm. Do you want to put in the work and effort to try to change all that at your firm or are you just cooked and burnt out from 40 years in the profession and you're like waving a white flag? Just come save me, pay the buyout that's in my agreement and call it a day. We really want the first type of firm. This way we can start creating this mini army of future oriented, want to change the way the profession looks to everybody type of firm that's dotted all over the country. So it makes the whole profession look like you should be in it. There's a lot of cool things we get to do. Yeah. OK, interesting. And then I guess kind of speaking of acquisitions, you were actually at a firm that got acquired previously. And I want to talk about your post acquisition experience as well. But I mean, to start off, you were at a smaller local firm, which I imagine was probably an acquisition by Markham, right? Yes. And my firm was in the RSM Alliance, another accounting firm backed alliance. And that's where I learned a lot of what I liked about being an alliance, what I wish I had and kind of what we're trying to bring forward in ours as well. And we love the guys at RSM, Dean, Kevin, guys are awesome. Mm hmm. OK, and so you were not quite a partner yet at the time of the acquisition, right? I think you were a principal. Yes, I was a non-equity partner. That was the title that we gave. So the outside world thought I was a partner, but I wasn't wasn't owned. I didn't own anything. OK, and then what does that look like? I mean, both kind of operationally and financially. Right. Like I in a lot of these acquisitions and private equity deals, like that's who people were saying, like, oh, no, this must be really bad for them, for like the senior managers. And like you said, kind of like the income partners and principals. Right. So what like what did that look like? I guess, first of all, like from a financial structure perspective when they came in and acquired it. Yeah. So the financial structure was was similar instead of being like Phil Amino was an S Corp. So I got a W-2, Markham's a partnership, so I got a K-1. They told me I was going to get paid. It's just on a different form. We kind of were able to negotiate it just like a salary because I was a non-equity partner. To be fair, I highly recommend starting as non-equity and a partner so that you know what it's really like to be in business with these people. Being an employee with them is a different level than being in business. And it's kind of like being engaged versus married. Engagements are really easy to break up. Marriage is long, painful, divorce from marriage is long and painful, requires legal and it's it could be a mess. So the financial part for me was once I figured out that Markham and I had different ideas of success and what we wanted out of my career. It cost me 90 days. Well, that's not bad. OK. So so you basically got it, but so you basically got brought in from non-equity partner into another kind of non-equity partner role at Markham. Yes. And did you feel like that kind of brought you back in terms of like the path towards becoming an equity partner as a result of that of that buyout or not really? I wasn't still really on the path of I must be an equity partner to be successful in my career. I assume that a larger firm, that there was another hierarchy within the partnership structure to go climb versus, hey, there's four partners. We sit around a monthly partner meetings. I kind of have a say in what we do. At least my input is heard. I figured there's 300 partners at Markham. There's an executive committee. There's regionals like. I was a middle manager at a big company now, right, but I got to manage my team and my clients and I'd go I'd go knock on the doors with the crazy ideas I had and see what the appetite was for them. And. After a consistent nose, I just stopped asking and started doing them. OK, interesting. What were some of those crazy ideas? The last busy season I worked, I told my team we weren't going to work more than 60 hours a week, like not chargeable, just total 60 hours. And we were going to get everything done. I said, I'm going to bill at least 15 percent more on every client. If you need to play the time sheet game, I'll let you know which clients like so you can get up to your charge hour minimums. Because I know we can do it like I've mapped it all out. We've got a great team here. But I don't want you taking it on the chin because I decided I'm only going to work 58 hours a week. I don't want you working 90 because I'm working 58. That doesn't fly. And we did it except for the second to last week, because I hate deadline week. So I worked a few more hours over 60 the week before April 15th, but worked like 49 the week of April 15. So to me, it evened out. Yeah. And we beat the revenue target by 20 percent for the the January through April. Interesting. Yeah, I think a lot of that like requirement of like, oh, and even like the unspoken stuff, like the culture of like, oh, you're leaving at 7 p.m., must be nice, like or stuff like that. Like, I think a lot of that just puts a lot of pressure on just showing up and just being there. And there isn't enough emphasis on actual like productivity and like getting the stuff done right. Like, I think I think that's a huge, huge cultural issue in accounting where it's like you need to be a butt in a seat. And half the people who are enforcing that essentially, they're just on their phone scrolling all day because they're so burnt out. Right. So that was a major frustration of mine. So, I mean, kudos to you for for trying something on that front. Yeah, I remember I think it was maybe 18 months straight. I would get a monthly call from one of the regional leaders and it would go like this. So, Mike, you missed your charge hour budget this month, too. Yep. What do you do about it? Nothing. Why not? Where's my revenue? 10 percent higher than where it should be. That's why I'm not going to do anything different. Yeah. I'm missing revenue goals. Yeah. You should call me. Yeah. Charge hours, get revenue. So if my job is to bring in revenue, look at revenue. Yeah. Do you think that the overreliance on the billable hours is kind of like one of the biggest things plaguing the accounting industry? Yes, it's an antiquated metric back from when we used to have to do things on Greenbar and nobody could be faster on Greenbar than anybody else because it's just handwriting. Yeah. And really, who decided that the value to the client was how long we spent on something? Like the clients define their own value. We just have to try to guess what it is. If it takes me two hours, but it's worth 10 grand to the client, charge them 10 grand. Yeah. Oppositely, if it takes you 20 hours to do the basic bookkeeping job, that's still only worth a thousand bucks to the client. Like you got to figure that stuff out. It's not just flat rate times the amount of time it takes. Yeah. So you think revenue, like you think that evaluating performance by revenue would kind of like solve a lot of these problems? I really do. And I'm doing a presentation about this at the end of May at the Accounting Today conference. So I don't want to give away too many of those ideas. But I think that if you look at a bell curve of how accountants perform within a firm, the average accountant, whether you do charge hours or revenue, is going to put about the right amount of hours in, going to have about the right level of realization, about the right level of utilization. And they're going to be just fine. If you switch to revenue, all those things still happen. And they're still going to be just fine. And we need a lot of employees like that. There's a lot of work to get done. We need people that are average and above average at producing the work. I think what we find if we looked at revenue is people who think like you and I do, who the first time we did a 20-hour job in six hours and got rewarded with another project, and we learned, oh, that's going to take 20 hours from now on. Yeah. We're a little bit disengaged now. Like I'm not going to go above and beyond. Maybe I will, but I'm going to scroll on my phone working from home for those extra 14 hours and still at the client budget. I'm not doing anything extra. But if you tell me if you hit your revenue target for the month, you could be done working. Yeah. All right. I have an incentive now. How few hours can I work this month so I can go enjoy my life where I'm still a valuable asset to the company because I'm generating the 60,000 of revenue I'm supposed to this month? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's eye-opening. Exactly like you said. The first time you really outperform and then realize that there's nothing on the other side of that. My coach at Deloitte was this absolute wunderkind prodigy guy. So I got really lucky with the teams I was on, but we worked on, I think it was the biggest acquisition deal ever in the city as a tax team. And we came in, I forget what it was, but it was something outrageous. It was like $300,000 under budget or something. And yeah, I got to taste caviar for the first time. Cool. But then after that, it was just like, cool, next project. Boom. And I was making like $45,000 a year at the time. And I was like, this is like, you mean we came in 10 times my salary under budget and I get nothing? And then later that year, it was like, hey, yeah, you're in the range of your billable hour target, but we wish you'd gotten a little bit more hours. And I was like, I worked on all of the highest revenue projects there were because I was good. But it just, yeah, that was very frustrating to me and very eye-opening of the issues in the industry. Yeah. Imagine if they had said, hey, here's $8,000, go on a week-long vacation to hit your billable hour target. Go put the whole week to this client too because you shouldn't be punished for that. Yeah. Or there's this sidebar kind of calculation of, all right, you were so under budget, here's a 200-hour credit towards your goal. Like we know it's there. Yeah. Yeah. And so why did you end up leaving as a partner at Markham in the end? I had this partner review that I was really excited about. And just for a little bit of background, we joined just before the big tax law change and I was a tax leader at Filamino. So that whole thing would have been falling on me. Yeah. At Markham, the national tax did that. I didn't have to do that. Especially that foreign like guilty stuff. We had one client that we came over with that had that, would have been all on me to figure all that out for one. So like resources like that were great. Yeah. I was also on our national CARES Act team and pat myself on the back a little, I crushed it. Like developed a process, spreadsheet, like worked with teams of people to do it. Absolutely killed it. Generated 15, if not 20 million of revenue for the firm through the work we did. Of course, not if it lands on my scorecard, because it's not my charge hours, it's not my client. And I wasn't charging all these phone calls. So they're like, hey, so you missed your charge hour goal by 300 hours. How are you going to make up for that? I'm like, I beat my revenue target by 50%. Yeah. Like, yeah, yeah. But if you work more, we'll make more. I said, you might, I don't. And they were like, well, like, what about a bonus? I was like, didn't I just generate like eight figures of revenue that doesn't land on my scorecard? Like, doesn't that factor in? I said, here's the deal. Like, I just showcased a leadership skill set in a variable environment that accounts typically aren't good in. I have a weird last name. Everybody in the company knows it. If you need someone else to lead something at the firm and I send an email about it, they're going to open it. Yeah. So what's that thing? Because in the next year, I could offload my whole client base to other superstar managers who could be partners. I could wrap up the CARES Act stuff and I can go lead this next thing. What is it? They go, well, you need like 2 million of origination before we start considering you for leadership. Why? That's a totally different skill set. Absolutely valuable. But I stink at it. Origination being like business development, like bringing in... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go be a rainmaker. I was like, but that's not adaptive leadership. Yeah. Those are two different things. And they kept kind of harping on that part. I said, all right, I have another idea for 300 hours. Tell me what you think of this one. Give me your 10 best senior managers that you want to be partners here and I'll show them how to be twice as efficient at their job just like I was. Because I had a $1.2 million budget with 1,200 hours and I did 1.8 in 900 hours. So they were expecting like a one-to-one and I did two-to-one. Yeah. You're telling me that a senior manager that could be twice as efficient at their job and then able to go home is ever going to leave when you make them partner? I said, we could just go create a stable of future partners that think about this whole thing differently. And in five years, no one's going to recognize Markham and it's going to be a leader in the entire industry of how to do things different. And they were like, no, we need them doing work. Yeah. Yeah, I think, who was it? I think it was, I know Chase Berkey reposted it. I don't think it was his article though, around like the limitations of the partnership model. And it was basically just like, yeah, big ideas get shot down basically because we don't have time to reinvent because we just need to produce, right? Which is truly unfortunate. But it sounds like you're able to kind of push some of those new ideas over at Aprio. So I mean, that's great. And it is having its impact as well. What do you think the next biggest issue is in the talent pipeline right now? Beyond kind of this like rigidity and obsession with the billable hour? I think it's too many accountants start off talking about the worst parts of our job. Okay. To put it in context, if you talk with an architect or an engineer or a lawyer, they talk about the results they got. I built that building. I helped my clients get X. They don't talk about, I worked 90 hours for four straight weeks to do it. I've never heard them talk about that. But you talk to an accountant, you're like, how's busy season? First thing out of the mouth, I worked 84 hours last week. Yeah. Okay. Like, what'd you do? Well, what do you mean? You must've been working on client stuff. Did you have an impact? Did you talk to someone? Were you at a cool board meeting? Toured a great manufacturing plant? What'd you do? Yeah. If we started talking to potential accountants, students about the cool stuff we do, people are willing to put in the time and the effort and the work to go do those things. What do you love doing? Do you watch the latest Marvel movie? And we watch the credits of those, right? You scroll through, accountant is on there. If you love movies, but you're not a good enough actor, you could go work in the movies in accounting. I was just at the Bushnell watching Wicked last night. The accountants are listed in the program. So these are things that require elite talent, whether it's sports, arts, entertainment. You can go work in those industries, even though you don't have the elite level of talent. How cool is it to watch the hockey playoffs right now and be like, I did that guy's tax return. Yeah. We had the team doing a lot of the NHL players in the office I worked in. I actually looked at the work and I was like, this seems awful. But it was all the huge, huge hockey and sports fans doing that. I think a lot of them found some intrinsic pleasure out of Like, you know, Oh, hey, that famous hockey player, like I yeah, I did his taxes. And he just, you know, knock that guy's teeth out tonight. Like, that's awesome. Um, and I do think that a lot of the kind of lack of pride in this. I think also stems to everything being reduced down to a billable hour. Right. And so that's how people talk because that's how it gets brought up to them. Right. So it's like, Oh yeah. You know, crush the billable hour target without really talking about what they did. Um, yeah. And most of the work that we have is repetitive. So if you were my client last year and I did your tax return and it was $2,000, you probably expect to pay 21, 2,200 this year. So I know what I'm billing you, you know, what I'm billing you as long as nothing weird happened. So if we already know the fixed fee, shouldn't our goal be get it done as fast as possible without any quality issues and then go home, go enjoy the fruits of our labor? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Um, and so how do we make the profession more appealing kind of in the long run? I guess maybe outside of moving away from the billable hour. I think it's probably like 12 or 14 different knobs. We've got to turn individually, which is what's making it so difficult. Yeah. Uh, we hear about the 150 hours and say what you will about it, but it's extraordinarily difficult to change that legislatively with all the jurisdictions. Not sure if that's the best place to put our efforts when there's other knobs we could be turning. And like this new ELE program is trying to, you know, lessen the burden of that by, you know, hooking up with Tulane and having it cost what a community college credit costs so that, you know, professions do need some more education. I've got a freshman in college and a senior that's going to college and both the things they want to do are in other professions and they're going to require grad school for those professions. We got to pay people for what they're doing. I love doing the math for people on, I want to pay this. You were telling me I have to pay the staff account $70,000. Like, yeah. Like why? I'm like, cause it's $33 an hour. Like that's a Costco manager salary. Like, yeah. Pay them for their education. Like they're brilliant. Like, aren't you brilliant? You're a partner here. You have an accounting education from a similar school. Yeah. Treat them like they're brilliant. Like, yeah. And then someone goes, well, I can't afford it. Well, it's because we suck at billing. Like you do rate times time and you're when you're efficient, you lose money, but the client doesn't see any less value. Go curate your client base, pay people what they're worth. Don't make them wait 15 years to be a partner, to actually get the financial benefits. Yeah. Have them start out with them. And here's one that doesn't even require a whole bunch of work. Tell people what they make at the next level. Right. How many calls did we get when we were four years in as seniors after passing a CPA and someone goes, do you want to be an internal audit for a hundred grand? Yeah. And I'm like, well, that's a lot more than I'm making, but that job's not for me. Like I have friends in it. They like it. I'm glad they do. Cause it means I don't have to do it. Yeah. But if someone had said, Hey, by the way, I know you're making 68 right now, the bump at manager goes to 85. Oh, well then when I get these calls from, to go be the controller at the local construction company for 90, I can compare it to 85 instead of 68. Yeah. What if we said senior managers started like 137? You're, you're changing what people are comparing to. And of course you're getting calls because they're awesome at their job. Don't assume they're not getting calls. Give them the ammunition they need to make the decision to stay. Yeah. I agree so deeply with that point. And I mean, that's the, that last point is the whole reason why I made big for transparency, right. Is like, you know, I was making nothing when I was working at the big four firm. And I just, like, I was making half my week's pay working Friday night at the bar. And I always had all through university. I had outrageously well-paid like side gigs and things like that. Like I was DJing, I was in nightlife, I was doing whatever. So I was used to like, I'll take down 400 bucks in a night, like. 500 bucks in a night, you know, DJ, a wedding, $1,100, like whatever. And then I show up and I'm doing all this hard work and I, I was making nothing and I was getting super discouraged because I did, I just didn't understand like what was out there kind of at the senior manager, even partner level. I think like understanding that better would have helped motivate me a little bit, but instead there was all this secrecy around it. Right. And so that's where kind of big for transparency was born as well. And the fact that like we were being paid less than the local market and that ended up getting fixed. But I agree with that as well. And I think that like, it is a bit of like a bold move, but I do think that a slight tipping of the scale, like making things a little bit less steep in terms of your earning progression, once you hit partner would actually be good for everyone, including partners. Right. Like Blake Oliver has been posting a lot about this of like, Hey, like partners, like don't seem that happy. And I did a lot of like satisfaction surveys on big fortune transparency and like partner satisfaction was pretty low and they were working ridiculous hours and it's like, I don't want to make $800,000 and not see my family ever again. Right. Like it's like, so I think there is something to it where like, if that gets. And, and again, partners should get paid super well, like, but maybe if it was a little bit less steep, they would have less of a talent pipeline issue, be able to work less, less of the burden falls on them because at the end of the day, that's where the buck stops. Right. And if there's not enough people to do the work, like they've got to figure it out. Um, so I think that is like a large part of the issue. And, you know, I think these conversations go a long way to help solve it. People like you and like senior management positions at places with lots of influence really help. I hope big for transparency can trick can contribute to helping, but, um, you know, I'm really glad we're having these conversations for sure. Me too. And back on the kids brilliance, they've been watching the partner's work sitting in their office. First one in last one out, generally not happy, like their body language, missing kids events. And they're like, I don't want that life. Like you can't pay me enough for that life. Like you can put, you know, $6 million on that number. It's like, no, I'm not going to do it because I'm not missing my kid's soccer game. Cause she might not play after this year. And I want that memory. I want to go to Disney and not be sitting in line at the carousel on my phone, trying to answer an email about, you know, this latest transaction I was on. Like there's a team of people. They're brilliant. And if you don't believe they can handle it, you did a bad job training them. Yeah. Cause you learned like none of this stuff that we do is innate. Like it's like you're born with it. Yeah. We all learned how to do it. So if you're sitting there saying my team can't handle it, it has to be me sit down with your team and brain dump on them for a year and then see how much better your life gets. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that's a little bit scary with like the increase of outsourcing. Like I think in general, like outsourcing is important for the industry, but like to a degree, right? Like later in my career, I was only confident in being able to give real answers because again, my coach spent so long with me in the early days where like it would have been quicker for him to just do it. Right. Or just send it to some team for processing or whatever. But yeah, eventually, like he really like invested in us and you know, I think that paid off later because everyone, we were really eager to do the project that he had and we were like, Oh no, sorry. Like I'm not available for whatever, like I'm working with this guy. Um, but like a lot of people aren't doing that and like at a more macro level, I think like firms are almost not doing that where they're going like, Oh, like, you know, why let the like low level work go to some intern who is completely out of their depth in anything other than that? And so they just send it offshore and then, you know, then they lose that learning opportunity, which is tricky. So, yeah. Yeah. There's a definite balance there. And I think what I'd like to see an experiment on is keep 15% of it in house for the training aspect. Right. Know that you're making the margin on the other stuff, but you're investing in these people on the other 15% because that intern doesn't need to do it 60 times to understand it. She needs to do it nine times. Yeah. So, and I think that's a, it's like we had to go do it 60 times because that's, we didn't have outsourced, we didn't have the technology and the automation. So we had to do the lowest level work. Yeah. But we learned how to do it after nine and then we figured out how fast can I get this done? Cause it's the worst part of my job. Yeah. But I need to understand it so that I could go do the next thing. It's like that math progression, right? You don't start a calculus, you started an addition. So we can outsource a bunch of it, but keep it in house, use it for training. That's how people can get the nuts and bolts of how things come in. So four years from now, when they're having a conversation with a client about their accounting system, we know why their accounting systems mangled because we did the nuts and bolts stuff four years ago. And then we'd say, Hey, so we know how to fix that. The problem is it's going to take four days. It's going to cost you $12,000, which is, you know, you're paying a person who's underqualified to be your controller who can't do the bookkeeping, right? 60 grand, like just, just call it 72 this year. Right. Because we have to fix it for 12. Yeah. And then go take five of that and send that person to training so they know what they're doing next year. And it's not the same thing over and over again. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. There's, there's so many topics here that I want to dig into. I feel like I'm gonna have to have you back on very soon. Talk, talk about some of these again. But before I let you go, I always have like one kind of final question I like to ask. And that's basically, what is your advice for a young person who's about to enter the profession or considering entering the profession of accounting and how can they make the best out of it? I like to say, get a breadth of experience. I've done work on a lot of areas of accounting, being at, at local firms. I've done, you know, business valuations. I've done audits. I've done nonprofits, EBPs, individual tax, corporate tax, um, been on consulting teams, traveled a little bit, didn't travel at all. You kind of get a sense of what you really do enjoy. And then you could see on which parts that you're working on. Do you think that's where the profession's going? Right. When we started, the profession wasn't changing as fast as it is now. You know, if you were an expert at bookkeeping back in the day, you always had work because there was always client books that are mangled. Is that going to be needed in eight years on a person with a 40 year career? When we've got all of these technologies that we've seen grow the last five, six years, whereas you get something like state and local tax constantly changing, super weird, 55 jurisdictions. If you really like tax, that might be an area to go in. And can you really guess that when you're 22 and you just graduated college at a large national firm, that's going to go stick you like on the insurance audit team? I'm in Connecticut. That's where they all go. Okay. What if you don't like insurance audit and that's your only experience? You go, Oh, well, accounting sucks. I'm out. You're like, well, did you try anything else? Yeah. Okay. Interesting. That's what I like. And to do that, like pay attention to your alumni groups and your accounting association, like ask the seniors that are graduating, where are you working? Why? That's a really good idea for sure. Yeah. Start doing the research early so that you can, they don't even know what the opportunities are. They don't know that they could go do the hot, like Austin Matto, Edo's tax return. Like someone's doing that. That's their job. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, I really appreciate the advice. I appreciate the conversation. Like I said, I think I'm going to have to have you back on. I feel like there's a lot more for us to dig into. Um, but yeah, I really appreciate you joining me on the pod, Mike. Thank you. Great being here. Dominic. Look forward to the next time. All right. Thank you. Bye.